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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the links between employee attitudes, customer loyalty and business results.
Methodology/approach – From a conceptual point of view, this employee-customer-business results chain is well founded and generally accepted, also in the European Excellence Model. But for many companies, it seems difficult to demonstrate such links, and several issues must be addressed to uncover the links. To investigate these links empirically, a hotel chain provided data matching employee and customer measures with measures of profit, and a modeling approach is developed.
Findings – The model is successfully applied. As it is possible to estimate and test the links, we have demonstrated the effects of employee attitudes on customer loyalty and further on business results. The findings provide strong empirical evidence for the developed model, and the study provided evidence of theemployee-customer-business result chain.
Research limitations – The study is limited to four hotels in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Practical implications – The research findings provide a better understanding of the employee-customer-business result chain and may help practitioners in improving company financial performance.
Originality/value – This paper provides new insights into the relationships between employee attitudes, customer loyalty, and business results.

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A Consumer Neuroscience Study of Information Processing of Brand Advertisements and the Store Environment in Compulsive Buying

Bagdziunaite, Dalia(Frederiksberg, 2018)

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Abstract:

Background. Compulsive buying—defined as excessive, uncontrolled, and repetitive buying—
is a serious problem in today’s society, driven by consumeristic values and reinforced by
marketing efforts. However, the research on the external influences (e.g., brand information) and
underlying processes that explain consumer behavior in brand-manifesting situations in
compulsive buying is relatively scarce. This thesis provides an integrative literature review and
two experimental studies that yield cross-disciplinary insights into the compulsive buying
phenomenon. The thesis aims to study the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses that
characterize consumer-brand interactions at relevant brand touchpoints in compulsive buying.
Research methodology. Two experimental studies investigate similarities and differences
between two groups of consumers with high and low compulsive buying tendencies (CBTs) at
two brand touchpoints that represent a pre-purchase and purchase phase of the consumer
journey. Multimodal consumer neuroscience tools (i.e., eye-tracker, EEG, and EDA) are
employed to collect neurophysiological and physiological responses during exposure to
marketing information. The first study examines consumer information processing of
advertisements during a simulated TV commercial-viewing experiment. The second study
investigates consumer information processing of store environments during a field experiment
conducted in two single-brand fashion-apparel stores (i.e., low-end vs. high-end).
Findings. The findings from the first study indicate that, regardless of their CBT level,
consumers tend to allocate a relatively equal amount of cognitive resources to attend to, process,
and remember exposed advertising information during the entire duration of commercial
viewing. The two groups differed in their visual processing of brand elements only when
viewing advertisements related to social cause. In the consumer group with a high CBT, a higher
cognitive workload was linked to a lower probability of subsequent brand recognition. The
findings from the second study revealed that, regardless of the fashion-store type, consumers
with a high CBT chose items that were more expensive than consumers with a low CBT. The
changes in physiological arousal during the first minute of shopping showed that, although both
consumer groups were more emotionally responsive to the high-end than the low-end fashion store, the emotional receptivity in both groups was expressed in different physiological
responses. Specifically, consumers with a high CBT demonstrated a higher frequency and a
shorter duration of emotional responses, whereas consumers with a low CBT showed a higher
amplitude of emotional responses in the high-end fashion store than in the low-end fashion
store. The results indicate that there are two potentially different mechanisms that occur in the
two consumer groups during encounters with store information.
Conclusions. This thesis provides theoretical, methodological, managerial, and societal
contributions. This research highlights the fact that compulsive buying is a complex
phenomenon and that researchers should address both internal and external influences, examine
the unconscious processes and mechanisms, and study consumer responses to marketing
information in more naturalistic settings. The thesis also promotes the integration of consumer
neuroscience tools with the compulsive buying research practice, aims to increase the awareness
of the problem of compulsive buying, and encourages the development of novel, technologybased
and scientifically driven consumer-behavior-monitoring policies.

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Retail stores are designed to attract and inspire consumers. They also function as communication
platforms between brand and consumer. Customers, both consciously and unconsciously, decode
messages embedded in the store design, and use them in their decision-making. But how can
design managers know with any certainty whether the choices they make actually add value, to
the products in the store? This dilemma has been addressed from varying perspectives in businessrelated
design and marketing literature. John Heskett (2005) acknowledges the conflict of
imperatives that obtains between a company and the users of its products and ascribes to design
the role of providing a bridge between them. Philip Kotler (1973) underscores the need for
designers to understand the targeted consumers by making a distinction between intended and
perceived atmosphere. The intended atmosphere is, of course, the set of sensory qualities that the
designer of an environment means to invoke. But a design is not always perceived as intended;
indeed, perception can vary significantly from one customer to the next. Apart from offering
insights in the retail designer’s process of creating stores that function as a marketing tool, this
dissertation proposes a method for measuring whether decisions made by the store designer do
indeed support the products from the targeted consumer’s perspective. In four articles, a toolbox
is provided, offering insights of four types: (1) the theoretical and empirical, aimed at developing
an understanding of the different categories within the retail designer's working process; (2) a
codification of the stakeholders and constraint generators affecting the retail design process; (3)
the proposal of a new method for studying spillover effects from store interior to product; and (4)
the testing of this method in two field experiments, where we measure the effects of retail design
on those for whom the design is ultimately intended: consumers.

Traditionally, tourists spend their holidays in tourist spaces that provide the needed infrastructure for their experiences (i.e., hotels, restaurants, sight-seeing spots). However, nowadays tourists often occupy more residential space than in the past; this development is fuelled at least by two important trends in tourism. First, destination marketing organizations (DMO’s) increasingly seek to intertwine tourists‘ paths with local neighbourhood in order to create perceived tourist authenticity (e.g. the ‘localhood’ strategy of various city tourism organizations; Wonderful Copenhagen, 2017). Second, shared economy offerings, such as Airbnb, create tourist spaces in residential areas (Gutierrez et al., 2017). Both developments result in the integration of tourists into the residents’ living sphere, and anecdotal evidence indicates that this does not come without fraction between residents and tourists (e.g., Andereck et al., 2005; Gutierrez et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2013).